Race and intelligence: the debate continues

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Race and intelligence: the debate continues

I posted a while back on two duelling essays in Nature on the intensely controversial subject of whether scientists should be permitted to study group differences in cognition. Nature now has a series of correspondence on the topic in its latest issue.

So, given that we have logical reason to hypothesize about differencesin cognitive abilities, why would we expect to measure these by using asingle number such as IQ, which suggests there must be a hierarchy ofcognitive function? The prediction surely is that each population willadapt to be better at the particular cognitive tasks that are mostimportant for survival in its own environment. If this is the case,then identifying these (potentially adaptive) differences in cognitiveability, and searching for associations with genetic variants, couldprovide fascinating insights into how our brains work.

This makes good sense; if human populations have indeed undergone some level of genetic adaptation to meet differing cognitive demands (which seems entirely possible given what we know about recent human evolution), then investigating group differences may provide useful insights into the molecular architecture of cognition.

As the philosopher John Stuart Mill points out, whenyou assert that a topic is not to be debated, you are foreclosing notsome narrow statement of opinion on that topic, but the wholespiralling universe of discourse that it may inspire. Mill thought thatonly someone so self-deluded as to think his own judgement wasinfallible could wish to circumscribe an unpredictable future in thisway.

Rose should be very certain he is correct. Ifnot, and if he converts the rest of us, only Jensen and those of hispersuasion [i.e. advocates of group differences] will publish; and they will win the minds of studentsbecause the rest of us have all adopted a policy of unilateraldisarmament.

By not investigating the race-intelligence link, we not only perpetuateignorance and the prejudice that thrives on ignorance. We also depriveourselves of the possibility to tackle the existing inequalities, firstby a judicious development policy and – should genetic differencesindeed be important – by eventually changing the allele frequencies ofthe offending genes. We should not get stuck in the twentieth-centuryassumption that environments are changeable but genes are not. Thiswill no longer be the case in the twenty-first century. [my emphasis]

This is not a debate that will be resolved any time soon, but it is a credit to Nature that they have permitted such a robust exchange of views on this rather dangerous topic within their pages.